Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to a method of supporting, by a plurality of support tools, an object to be supported, for example, an industrial machinery, such as a machine tool, an object to be machined by a machine tool, or the like, and more specifically relates to a method of releasing the supporting of the object by the support tools and then reinstalling the object at the same location or a different location by means of the support tools.
Background of the Disclosure
For example, when an object to be machined is machined using a machine tool such as a machining center, the following steps are performed: installing the object to be machined on a table of the machine tool using the support tools and machining the object; after detaching the machined object from the machine tool, in other words, after releasing the supporting of the machined object by the support tools, loading the detached machined object onto, for example, a three-dimensional measurement machine and measuring the machining accuracy of the machined object by the three-dimensional measurement machine; and reinstalling the object on the table of the machine tool to perform corrective machining in order to correct machining errors based on the measurement result.
Further, also as for industrial machinery, such as a machine tool, although it is installed at a desired location using the support tools, there are some cases where the necessity of reinstalling it occurs, such as, for example, a case where the installing location thereof is changed due to change of a production line or the like.
As such a method of installing an object to be supported, conventionally, there has been employed a mode which is performed using, for example, support tools having jack bolts, wherein, first, the object to be supported is placed on the support tools (reference support tools) positioned at three points serving as references, then the supporting states of the jack bolts of the reference support tools are adjusted so that a level placed on a reference surface of the object to be supported indicates approximately being horizontal, thereafter the object to be supported is supported by the other support tools at points other than the reference points, and the supporting states of the jack bolts of the other support tools are adjusted so that the reference surface is brought into a horizontal state.
In this mode, the operator has been required to perform a cumbersome operation in which the operator goes or goes back and forth around the object to be supported many times to adjust the supporting states of the support tools, that is, the fastening states of the jack bolts little by little so that the object to be supported is horizontally supported. Moreover, because this adjusting operation tends to be very empirical and is a sensory operation, there is also a fundamental problem that the operation requires skills.
Thus, the installing (including reinstalling) of the object to be supported using the support tools has had the problems that a long period of time is required and that empirical skills are required. Particularly, in the above-described case where, after the machined object is measured offline, the machined object is reinstalled on the machine tool to perform corrective machining, if the number of times of repetition of the reinstalling is increased, there is caused a problem that the machining efficiency is extremely deteriorated. Moreover, in order to perform such corrective machining with high accuracy, the object, when being reinstalled on the machine tool, has to be precisely restored to the state before it was detached from the machine tool. However, it has been extremely difficult to perform such precise restoration by the conventional sensory operation as described above.
Therefore, conventionally, as the above-described support tools, support tools disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Utility Model Application Publication No. S62-156424 have been suggested. Each of the support tools is provided with a weight scale and is configured to be capable of displaying an acting load. Because the value indicated by the weight scales of the support tools is obtained in an initial state where the object to be supported is supported using the support tools, at the time of readjusting the object to be supported after moving it and even when the level (horizontal state) thereof which has been adjusted once is changed due to another cause, it is possible to restore the supported state of the object to the initial state by adjusting the support tools so that the values indicated by the weight scales become the initial value.